YouTube Stats Tracking Tools You Should Know About

Google Analytics is a great tool to figure out the activity surrounding your channel, where you might need improvement, getting the most out of advertising, mobile views, etc. But maybe you’d like a different opinion. Maybe you don’t like the way the stats are displayed. Maybe you’d like some other kinds of information, not only about yourself but other channels, and how you might compare to them. Well, Google Analytics, as powerful as it is, isn’t the only game in town. There are several other tools and websites you can use that use the statistics in a different way and interpret them differently.

A Sampling of YouTube User/Channel Statistics Tracking Tools

Here are a few that you should know about. Many of these sites rank channels differently, sometimes markedly different. It all depends on what they weigh as most important. They all have different methods, and it will be some combination of views, subscribers, comments, engagement, and so forth. What’s important is what works for you.

VidStatsX

VidStastX might have the most exhaustive amount of information on the site. While many tracking sites are all about what the top 100 YouTube channels are and maybe separate them into categories and sub-categories, VidStatsX also goes into ranks for individual videos. Want to know what is really trending today, rather than rely on that suspect YouTube “trending” page you can click on? VidStatsX has a page dedicated to top viewed videos for the day, week, month, and all-time. Each video has a rank that points to engagement or likeability.

VidStatsX has a trademarked tool called FutureRank that projects how a channel will perform over the next 7 days all the way up to 90 days. I think this site breaks down every single way you can break down a video: by genre, by favorites, by comments, ratings, and views.

If there was one knock for me personally on VidStatsX it’s that the data is so dense, it’s all that seems to populate the page. It’s a bunch of numbers and straightforward charts, with a presentation that isn’t all that attractive. There are occasional thumbnails representative of videos and channels that spruce the site up, but for the most part it can be overwhelming to look at. But for pure stats, VidStatsX has got them all. Here’s an example of a stats page they have, this one for YouTube’s Top 10 Viewed:

SocialBlade

SocialBlade (who we interviewed last week) is mostly about tracking channel figures, and it also breaks them down into categories and “top” lists. They have their own ranking system, so while the normal things like views and subscribers count, they have their own formula. So above all this site is about comparing top channels, and it breaks it down by country and category. Here’s an example list, using top viewed and top subscribers:

Again, it’s a bunch of charts and numbers, so not much in the way of looks here, but a simple, basic tool to show who’s who in YouTube.

ChannelMeter

ChannelMeter has the nicest design of these three. It doesn’t give you an automatic set of lists like VidStatsX or SocialBlade do, it just has a simple search field that you can type a channel name into and then it gives you a nice group of graphs to work with on that channel. Statistics are separated into subscribers, channel views, and video views, and you can change the graph to show an incremental or cumulative presentation. The range is anywhere from today to 3 months. You can change the stats to “table” just like the above sites do, but it’s nice to have graphic representation here.

ChannelMeter is a good tool to see what YouTubers were upset about in May, as you can see subscriber data fall dramatically in that month for just about everyone. Here’s a look at Philip DeFranco’s sxephil channel and his subscriber data for May:

That came from YouTube’s spring cleaning that occurred, taking out dormant accounts and you know, being YouTube. That kind of graph makes the raw data clearer, it gives it meaning. You can go to VidStatsX and find this kind of data but this kind of presentation makes one question why such a change occurred. When you compare the graph above with other big channels, the picture becomes clear: “Something (not entirely the channel’s fault) happened.”

One thing about ChannelMeter: if the channel is somewhat new, you might not be able to find it right away. And some rather well-established, though not well-viewed, channels don’t have complete data. So that’s a bit of a flaw in this site.

Really, in all, if you’re very much serious about your channel and want to get some awesome data, you can probably learn something from mainly Google Analytics and then all three of these sites, and comparing each one of them could give you your own raw data to work with so that your channel is optimized.

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